Quotes About Tradition

The English eat all sorts of birds - pigeons, ducks, sparrows - but if you tell them you eat puffin, you might as well come from Mars.

I have learned a great deal from the theatrical side of Covent Garden. The Paris Opera Ballet is more concerned with technique. It's perfect. It's beautiful. It's well done. But it lacks the theatrical tradition that is so important in England. At the Royal Ballet, absolutely everyone on stage seems to be caught up in the plot.

My grandparents were very well-educated people, but in the Jewish tradition. They knew everything about the Bible. And then they had to come to Brussels, to run away from Poland, because there was too much anti-Semitism. They lost everything they had.

Well-meaning Europeans sometimes argue that unlike the U.S., their countries are traditionally 'homogeneous' and have little experience with immigration.

I think the tradition of well-written history hasn't been squashed out of the academic world as much in Britain as it has in the United States.

Bowen is a Welsh name and the family background is more rugby than football, but we're English through and through.

I'm Welsh. We didn't do 'Peter Pan.' We have far more ancient legends to be put to sleep with.

To be honest, I think that I am a bit of a singer, coming from Wales; being Welsh, we are all very proud of our singing heritage.

Obviously Gwilym is a very Welsh name! My father is from Maesteg, and my mother's from Abergavenny.

I always speak Welsh to my family.

My Welsh grandmother Mair didn't meet my grandfather until she was 28, quite old to be unmarried in the early '40s.

Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old.

My great-grandfather was a kola nut trader and the richest man in West Africa at the time of his death. My father was a businessman and politician. I was actually raised by my grandfather.

There has been a terrible hemorrhage of educated women to the West where they can flourish. I understand, but it is terrible. We must stay home.

In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centred cultures.

The cause of the break with the tradition of antiquity was the rapid and unexpected advance of Islam. The result of this advance was the final separation of East from West, and the end of the Mediterranean unity.

There are alternate definitions of manhood in the West.

I met my wife in Bombay at an official function. And then we courted for three years. That's a great old term, 'courting.' And we had to do it quietly, of course, because you would know the difficulties one might have with Indian parents. She was advised by her father that people in the West don't take marriage seriously.

God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning.

I became interested in photography during my first visit to the United States. I was a student at a university in Holland. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the American West. That was when I learned about the tradition of nature in American photography.

Parenting is the hardest thing I have ever done. I tried to find the balance between the strict, traditional Chinese way I was raised, which I think can be too harsh, and what I see as a tendency in the West to be too permissive and indulgent. If I could do it all again, I would, with some adjustments.

Back in the 1500s, the culture that we had built in the West embraced multigenerational projects quite easily. Notre Dame. Massive cathedrals were not built over the course of a few years, they were built over a few generations. People who started building them knew they wouldn't be finished until their grandson was born.

You seek help from the elders. A society with elders is healthy. It's not always that way in the West.

The former West Germany was a semi-sovereign political pygmy, protected by America's military might and with barely any foreign policy of its own. As a result, the country has no machinery or tradition of strategic thinking, and most Germans are loth to see their government take the lead.